In the first two issues of Star Wars: Yoda from Marvel Comics, the diminutive green Jedi Master settled in on a distant planet called Turrak far from the Jedi Council and the bustling city of Coruscant to help ward off raids on a village populated with Scalvi by a band of pirates called the Crulkons.
Now, in issue #3 of the comic miniseries (released last Wednesday), Yoda has seemingly abandoned the Scalvi community after one of its adolescent members murdered a Crulkon raider in cold blood.
Decades have passed, and the youth of the Scalvi village have come to mimic Bree’s slaughter of the Crulkon with admiration, despite his scolding. We get a quick, two-page flashback to just after the events of the previous issue to see Yoda’s reaction to the killing, and then return to the “present,” where Bree lives in regret of not listening to the Jedi Master’s instructions. Then suddenly Yoda is back and the alarms are blaring in the village once again. But this time’s it’s Bree’s nephew Tren who wants to launch an attack on the Crulkon without the permission of the village elders, so he and his companions take a boat to the waterside platform occupied by their perceived enemies. Tren abducts a young Crulkon girl and brings her back to the Scalvi village, much to Bree’s shock and disapproval, but it’s too late to return her before the raiders are back, demanding the return of their youngling. While Master Yoda vows to fight alongside the Scalvi if it comes to that, Bree makes the decision to return the girl to the Crulkon as a gesture of peace, noting that they have plenty of food and supplies to share with their neighbors on Turrak.
Yoda makes a holo-call to Master Pra-Tre Veter on Coruscant, who admits he was wrong about Yoda’s commitment to the Scalvi people, and they both agree that the various inhabitant of Turrak just needed some “patience and trust” in order to find their commonality and learn how to get along. And so ends the first arc of this ten-issue miniseries written by Cavan Scott, which was interesting to me in that it demonstrated how (thanks to his extended lifespan compared to other species) Yoda was able to influence a civilization over a protracted period of time. I am curious as to whether Yoda saw this endgame coming from the very beginning and knew it was just a matter of investing his own time and effort into making it happen, or if he was ultimately making it up as he went along in response to the behavior of the Scalvi and Crulkon peoples. Either way, it’s a thought-provoking character study of one of the more enigmatic major characters in the Star Wars canon, not to mention a fascinating exploration of the Jedi peacemaking process, and I’m curious to see where Scott and his artist collaborators go from here in the series.
Star Wars: Yoda #3 is available now wherever comic books are sold.